[Board] Project Donations

[Frank Warmerdam]

Dave McIlhagga wrote:
> Tyler,
> 
> Why do you think it would be inappropriate to collect the 25% fee for 
> any size of donation to projects? It's in all projects interest that 
> OSGeo have sufficient funding to keep infrastructure in place, help with 
> promotion, linkage to local chapters, and all the other functions that 
> OSGeo performs. If these things are not of value to a project -- they 
> wouldn't have become OSGeo projects in the first place. Even having the 
> legal entity in place as a mechanism for people to donate to the 
> projects is an important service of value to projects.
> 
> It seems to me that this is reasonable given the time and infrastructure 
> to put these mechanisms in place and maintain them on an ongoing basis.

Tyler / Dave,

I also don't see any particular reason that small donations shouldn't be
subject to the 25% holding for general OSGeo purposes.

I am concerned that small donations could result in unnecessary hardship
to manage.  Did you have thoughts on how to avoid too much burden from
having to cash cheques for $20 and such?  Part of the 25% cut is to
cover the work required by OSGeo to manage the sponsorships.

I wouldn't mind changing http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Sponsorship
to remove the $500 minimum, but also to remove the requirement to give
recognition and to provide a sponsorship report to sponsors of less than
the silver ($3000USD) level.  This would keep overhead modest for the
project for small donations.

Note that projects can still collect and manage monies internally if they
want, but they aren't considered managed by or the responsibility of
OSGeo in any way.  So, for instance, a project lead could manage a paypal
account to receive "tips" for the project, used for project tshirts or
such if they wanted to.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org